When It Alteration Finds
by Athenae1
Summary: All atonement is selfish. Futurefic. GilesDawn.


Title: When It Alteration Finds

Author: Athenae

Summary: He's dressed all wrong for California

Warnings: Futurefic. Giles/Dawn. I know, I know, but I had to see if I could do it.

Spoilers: For all of it.

Author's Note: Thanks, again, to Antonia, my beta extraordinaire, without whose guidance I would never have allowed this to be seen by anyone. 

"I think sometimes she wanted to die," Dawn says, and he looks down at their hands, intertwined on the pale marble tabletop. 

She has lovely hands, long and spare and graceful. When she was 15 she came home from school one afternoon and cried to him that everything about her was ugly and wrong. She was 15, and there were days when she was the Slayer's heir apparent, and days when she was every other teenage girl, awkward, convinced of her hideousness.

That day, he told her she had lovely hands, and she stopped crying and smiled at him.

Everything in this cafe is made of metal and glass. He pictures her always surrounded by flounces and plush toy cats. He pictures her dressed in red and blue, and some hideous, fashionable shade of glittery orange. Here she wears black and white, cuts her hair at an angle, so it curves away from her face.

Here she's one hundred and twenty endless months older, and in the low light of this café he sees a strand of silver through her hair, a crease in her brow, and another part of his world tilts and slides away.

"I think she didn't want to set the new record," Dawn says, and for the first time in nearly ten years, he doesn't want to talk about it. 

He walks her back to her door, walking slightly ahead of her, because from the back, she's all bounce and skip and optimistic coltishness, everything her face and her new clothes are not. The oddest things are passed down in families: a handshake, a way of walking, the tilt of a head.

Just like a shadow attached to her body, bound to her with fishing line and fairy dust, and just as blameless.

***

His face filled her window one afternoon and she thought she was dreaming it.

She doesn't get visitors anymore, made it clear she doesn't want them. It took six years for the others to get that. They hovered and smothered and drove up here on weekends and pounded on her doors. She had to disconnect her phone for a while. 

They had their happy ending and it destroyed them all anyway. 

The world got them, the way it always does. And the second time Xander called her by her dead sister's name, she packed a bag.

The air in San Francisco is dry as fine champagne. She wakes to the foghorns over the bay, keeps a little studio here on the first floor of this building, a bed in the back, and some books. She paints, and she sells her paintings in a coffee shop, really cheap. She's broke, but she doesn't need much and she doesn't have to talk to anyone. 

Willow sent her money once after she left. Dawn called her, and her throat hurt for hours afterwards. She hung up on Willow and pulled the phone out of the wall. Her landlord was pissed.

She patched the plaster herself. 

Now this. She can either break the glass or let him in.

They couldn't find him for the funeral, but he's found her. 

***

He's been walking the city for hours, thinking if it seemed coincidental, if it looked like he had been out and about and just happened upon her, she wouldn't send him away. 

Before he left Cleveland, Xander told him he was being selfish. "She doesn't want to be found."

All atonement is selfish, he said. I need to reconcile. I need forgiveness. I need to talk. I need and she doesn't. 

"She isn't reconciled," Xander said, picking up Alex's toy truck and fiddling with it. Married six years now, in a quick civil ceremony to the pretty, charming desk girl at the first hotel they stayed in, married three years to the day after. 

Their lives all break now at "after." 

At the reception, at the pub, they'd toasted the future. Without meaning to, they left two empty places at the table. One for Buffy. One for Dawn. 

"I don't think you should go back to California," Xander said, and that would have been the final straw, if he'd listened. 

If he'd ever listened.

***

She would have sent Willow away. Xander, she might have called the police. 

Ever since Willy, Willy the Snitch for God's sakes, tried to hug her after the funeral, she has hated being touched. But she invites Giles in, takes his hand like a grown-up, offers him a glass of wine, white and sweet in a swirled crystal glass. 

They do hello, how are you. They don't do why are you here. They don't do why weren't you at the funeral, though she can tell he wants her to ask, and they don't do why haven't you called since then, though she can see her six years of silence in his eyes. 

And when he asks, she tells him, lethal and quiet, what it had been like for her.

"We scattered her ashes at dawn. She wanted that. From the top of the bluff where Willow almost ... Where Angel went to wait for the sun to rise. Where mom used to take us to look at the lights on Christmas Eve. We waited for the sunrise and we scattered them. Willow read a poem."

"Archibald MacLeish," she says, letting the wine's apple-sweetness linger on her lips. "'Her room, you'd say, and wonder why you called it hers.'"

"'As though she hadn't seven others,'" he recites, as if in some forgotten university lecture. "'Portrait of Madame G.M.' Written for Sara Murphy, lifelong friend of waters and artists in the 1920s. Very fitting."

She lets him finish, takes a deep breath, continues. "Then I spoke, and said I'd lived my entire life with her, and didn't know if half of those memories were real. I said I didn't care. I said every memory of her was of loving her, and that was all that mattered. I said I had the people who loved her who would help me remember.

"But remembering is all we did, and it got to be too much."

He takes her hand and says he is sorry. She looks down at his fingers, the fine down of graying hair and pulsing veins on the back of his hands, and then she gets up and she leaves.

***

When she comes back in, apologizes, offers to buy him a late lunch, he thinks that of all the things he expected, she's done none of them so far. She's closed off and oh, so confident, making him feel like a bumbling adolescent in the café, ordering for him, telling him she knows a variety of tea he'll like. Making chitchat with him, pushing, always pushing, that she was there and he wasn't.

She said her paintings were at a coffee shop in Nob Hill, so the next morning he walks there from his hotel, the inclines punishing his 53-year-old body.

One is a huge canvas, the city rising from the midsummer morning mist. Two others of the Golden Gate, like every painting sold near Fisherman's Wharf, the light soft and forgiving.

The one that captivates him, though, is tiny. Abstract, all shifting azure-gray-silvers, dwarfed by the gilt frame. He stares at it for a long time before he realizes: it's exactly the color of her dead sister's eyes.

He'd been in England when it happened. The others called, not knowing he was with the coven, not knowing he wouldn't be back to the flat for two months, not knowing what to say when they finally found him.

She hardly ever patrolled anymore, Xander said. Kennedy had the flu, so Buffy offered to pick up her shift, Willow said. Bloody Kennedy looked up at him, her eyes drowning in guilt, and said, "It was just an ordinary vampire." 

It could have happened on a thousand nights he was with her. It could have happened on a thousand nights in Sunnydale. Instead, it happened in Cleveland. And they'd already thrown her ashes out over the gaping hole of their past.

Roads went around it now, Xander said. It's a tourist attraction, almost, Willow said.

The first thing he asked after they stopped talking was "Where's Dawn?" 

***

Her landlord is a creepy guy named Billy who keeps a hairless cat. Allergies, he says. The cat is pink and wrinkled and she doesn't think a pet like that could give anyone comfort, but when it wanders down to see her on occasion she scratches it, ignoring the crawling feeling up her spine.

She's lived here three years now. It's the first time her life has been stable, as stable as you can be when you live over a fault, when you spend your days waiting for the ground to tremble.

The painting started earlier, when she was still staying in a crappy motel down near the Wharf, spending her days walking along the harbor streets staring at fat tourists and drunken college kids, homeless people begging for change, Asian women selling beaded and flowered jewelry. 

Painters sold pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, all of them the same, but one day she spent an entire afternoon watching a young, tattooed man create portraits of the people walking by, flawless brushstroke after brushstroke. The next day she sold her silver necklace, a birthday gift one year from Buffy, and bought canvases and jars.

She liked it. She set up her own booth on the street, next to an old Rastafarian selling CDs, and when a young woman stopped, said she had a coffee shop and would Dawn like to hang some of her paintings there, maybe she'd sell a few, Dawn said yes. She goes in every month now, and almost every month Laura tells her she's sold something and gives her a check.

Painting: something she knows no one in her family has ever done.

She's absurdly grateful to Billy, because he didn't call her invented references, because he gave her the apartment practically for nothing, because she promised to fix it up. She'd never done home improvement before, and so when she catches Giles staring at the fireplace she jumps in.

"It was whitewashed. I stripped it myself and I'm not completely done yet so that's why ..." she begins before she realizes she owes him nothing.

"What did you think of my work?" she asks instead, and when he turns around she sees what her sister used to see when she looked at him.

And she could close her eyes and be back there, in the living room with a different coffee table every month because things kept smashing it, with Willow and Tara making tea that smelled like kiwis in the kitchen, with her sister, her sister, who complained about the plumber's bill and tried to keep her out of trouble and always, always screwed it up. 

That's what she wanted, why she left. She wanted it all back. She wanted the house, buried half a mile deep in the sand, and her mom, and Janice, and worries about which sneakers were in that year. She wanted homework and boys. She wanted her sister, who conquered the fucking Hellmouth and died anyway, because maybe she thought she was immortal and stopped being careful, because maybe she was older at 25 than most people ever are, because maybe she just got unlucky in an unfamiliar cemetery. 

Dawn wanted all that back and she could never, never have it.

Now the last part of it is standing in front of her, and she thinks he wants it back, too. 

***

He sees it again now: Why he moved to Oxford. Why the London flat, the Cleveland condo, the Sunnydale apartment had all been unbearable at one time or another. Reminders stab in his side like he's run half a marathon, running away from loyalty, from love.

From the fact that their bonds were forged in necessity, and do not truly bind them. From the fact that Xander married a girl who doesn't know what Sunnydale High looked like; that Willow lives with one who doesn't remember the summer Buffy ran away. 

From the fact that he took it all seriously, the promises to be there for one another forever. That he believed Buffy, the last time she said she would never leave him again. What an old fool he was, and how little that knowledge soothes the ache low in his chest.

She's asking him now, and all of that rises in his heart, and strangles him. 

And instead of answering her question, he tells her, "I couldn't stand to let you go."

Dawn's sharp eyes dart to his face. He tried not to let himself feel sorry for her, but he's been doing it for years, and every habit wears a groove in human skin. 

"Are you sure it was me?" she asks, bitterness raw like lemon peel in her voice. "Me, that you wanted to hold on to?

"If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even exist," she continues. "Giles, the others made me claustrophobic. They did it to her, too, you know they did. There's such a fine line between loving someone and wanting to kill them, and I was crossing it every day."

"But to not allow them to even visit, to stay away for six years, Dawn!" 

To not return my calls, to send my Christmas cards back unopened, to refuse my letters …

She turns around. "I tried at first, but it was like they wouldn't let me age, wouldn't let me change. Even their tone of voice was the same, they used the same words with me as they had when I was 15 years old. They meant well, Giles, I know they did, but I couldn't breathe there. It was such an effort. Life isn't supposed to be like that." 

"What is it supposed to be like, then?" 

She looks down. "I don't know. Easier, I think."

He forces a laugh past the lump in his throat. "Your sister used to say the same thing."

The sound she made might have been a sob. She takes a step, turns, takes another, turns opposite. She will never lose the legacy of the ballet lessons she thinks she took during her false, false childhood.

"You can't just walk out, Dawn," he said.

"You think because you couldn't, everybody can't." 

She's right, and the knowledge of that slices through flesh and saws at bone.

"You can cut away everything that reminded you of your sister, you can cut away all the people who love you, all the places that caused you pain, and you find you've cut your life out entirely, don't you? Who are you, apart from all those other things? When you take them away, what do you have left?"

"I have my apartment, here. I have Laura in the coffee shop who sells my stuff. I have Billy the landlord and his scary cat Precious." She looks up at him, then. "And I have what I want to remember."

He's been fighting it since he saw her, spattered in pale pink and gray, black smock over jeans and a T-shirt, a smudge of tan in her hair. From the corner of his eye, from her silly-sad smile down her neck to her collarbone, the stubborn heft of her chin, she's the girl he loved for years, and recognition crashes over him, over and over him.

He's been strong, and he's been resolute, and he hasn't given up the work Buffy gave her life for, and he hasn't given up the fight. 

And maybe that's been the problem all along. Each day he wakes and sleeps and wants back just a second of what he used to feel when he touched her.

As Dawn's eyes go wide, he realizes, too late, that she didn't know.

"You and my sister were lovers, weren't you?" Not accusing, just … surprised.

"Yes." Amazed he can still feel ashamed.

"For how long?"

"Off and on …" he turned away, "for four years. It was never … anything that interfered with her relationships with others, or mine, for that matter. It was just …"

"Watcher-Slayer sex?"

When he turns back, shocked, she's smiling. All the childish petulance he noticed in her ten years ago has hardened into skills with weapons he never mastered. She calculates, sees where her daggers land, lines up another throw. He sees now why Xander and Willow stopped trying. Her knives sink into skin too close to their marks.

"It was something we both needed. Leave it at that." Thinking of the training room floor, beneath the vault, after Quentin left the Magic Box that day during Glory's terrible rampage. And the night of the prom, when a kiss on the forehead to comfort turned into something so, so strange.

And in his arms, taking comfort, mere days after she dug herself out of her grave. Dug through six feet of soil and rock for the girl front of him now, cocking an eyebrow, looking him up and down.

"Well, Giles," she says softly, "I never would have thought … "

But her eyes tell him otherwise. She has thought, and often, and she's thinking now.

"You're not an innocent, Dawn," he snaps. "I've been getting that look from girls all my life. Don't think I don't recognize it." 

She takes another step towards him, goading, and afraid. 

"You recognized it from my sister, that's for sure." 

He looks at her steadily, hoping sincerity breaks through her wall of sarcasm and spite. "Yes, I did," he says softly. "She was a beautiful woman, beautiful and brave and very, very kind. There's more than a little of her in you, Dawn, tempered though it is by your own beauty and strength."

At that her eyes soften at last, and warm. "And in you," she says, even more softly, putting a hand on his arm. "She told me once that you were horrified by her at first, by everything about her, and that you thought it was your job to rein her in. Help her learn some control."

He shakes his head. "That's true." 

"But she also told me that she thought you were so locked up, so closed off, and her job was to loosen you up." Her eyes haven't left his face. "And I used to see her joy in you, how you'd joke with the others, how she lightened your burdens a little. I still see it.

"Maybe that's why ... I don't mind so much, your being here. As much as I minded the others."

It's a weighty admission, he can see it in way she straightens after it's said. And he doesn't know what frightens him more: that she'll let him into her life a little, or that she'll continue to keep him out. 

Would it be such a terrible thing, he thinks, giving her exactly what she wants? Allowing her to give the same to him? One last touch on everything they've both lost? Buffy's death leveled them, and he's never really believed in sin.

She doesn't give him time to decide. Her mouth on his, her hands on his back, nails digging in: pain and strength will leave marks tomorrow, new scratches over old familiar scars.

She never grew taller, and she's thinner, thin like a bird, like an old woman is thin, like she's trying to disappear. And before he can stop himself he's reaching out, pressing his fingers into the groove in her collarbone, feeling a muscle seize beneath her paper skin. 

And it should be gentle and slow, with the cadence of a mourning song, but instead it's just awkward and exhausting and it makes them both angry. His shoulders ache from holding himself up on his hands, and she can't breathe when he crushes her into the mattress, she complains and makes him turn over, and her mouth is dry and cold. There's a smear of red paint behind her left ear and on the lobe of her right. She must have pushed her hair back; the red must have been on her hands, hands that are fists now, clenching, straining. He's hurting her, he knows it. 

She keeps her eyes open the whole time. 

When it's over she doesn't cry, or ask him to stay the night. He can't imagine how he could ever wake up beside her.

"I'll be back tomorrow," he says.

"No." She turns her face away. They are equal in their cowardice here. "Giles, why did you come here? Think this time, before you answer."

He doesn't have to; has known it since he saw her framed by her street-level window, her eyes fixed on the white possibility of her canvas. "Because I wanted to understand how you did it," he says softly, throat very tight. "How anyone ever went on from this. Because I haven't — I know it looks like I have, and Xander has, and Willow has, but we haven't done it, Dawn, and you have, somehow, and none of us can comprehend how. That's why everyone seems so angry with you. It's just that we can't understand—" 

She reaches out, then, and takes his hand in the fading light. "But you know, Giles. You did it the last time she died."

And is quiet for a moment before adding, "How do you think I knew where to start?" 

He hears her sigh as he draws on his clothes, looks down at her, naked and clean in a bed she pays to keep with the work of her brushes and her heart. She has regrets, but they're hers, and so is this.

He turns at the door. "I won't say goodbye," he says softly. "I didn't say it to your sister, I never did. I won't say it to you. I will say ... I loved her. I love you. I can't say in what way, or even if there's just one. But if you ever decide to pack up your canvases and go somewhere else, I would suggest ... Oxford. I keep an office there, for the Council." 

***

The next day, when she goes into the coffee shop to drop off her harbor painting, Laura hands her a check. "You sold one yesterday," she said.

"Which?" Dawn asks, but she knows.

"That little blue one," Laura says, shifting her baby to her other hip so she could wipe down the counter. "Older guy bought it, gorgeous, too, and an English accent, you should have seen him. But then, you'll never believe this. I told him I hoped he had a good place to hang it, so people could really see it, you know, and he said --"

"I know what he said," Dawn interrupts, feeling, for the first time in ten years, like she was going to cry. "He said he was going to burn it. Or throw it away." 

Laura's mouth hangs open now. Dawn resists the urge to reach across the counter and shut it for her. The baby starts to wail. 

"That's exactly what he said." Laura stares at her, then shakes her head. "Oh, well. No accounting for taste, I guess, but at least he paid full price. You can keep Billy off your back for another month." She looks at the new painting. 

"That one's nice, Dawnie." 

Across the blank white canvas, the gray and blue and pink and yellow ships sailed, mist closing around them, as the sun rose and warmed their sails. 

And on one of them, so small you could easily miss it, Dawn painted the figure of a girl, her arm raised, waving goodbye to all those who stood on the shore.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116


End file.
